Bad middle management throughout company, they are focused on only their team and metrics, so they push bad decisions that make them look good but hurt the programs overall. This also means that they try to push off harder tasks onto other groups, so you end up with lack of ownership and a hot potato effect that hurts overall productivity.
Way too many projects in flight (pardon the pun) and not enough people to do all the work, and now they are getting rid of contractors so a ton of tasks are going to be left incomplete.
Matrix org set up means nobody owns work start to finish. The teams are divided by disciplinary function, so individual contributors are lent out to projects and programs as needed. In theory this sounds great. However in practice this kills productivity as people have to get up to speed on a project, then when they transition off there is a ramp down and hand off. To make matters worse, this often leads to brain drain as decisions arent always documented very well and people who have transitioned off the project are needed to fill in knowledge gaps but the typical response is "sorry I dont work on that project anymore, ask someone else" to be honest its very unprofessional and shameful how pervasive this attitude has become. There really is a lack of accountability bottom to top.
Office politics are starting to really ramp up, we have meetings to tag up on items and decisions are made, but later on when work is needing to be done the decision makers go back on the compromises reached in the meeting. I cant count anymore how many times my boss and director have been CCd on emails when I refuse to do work that was supposed to be done by another group or when they want me to shift focus on a task that wasnt even planned for in this sprint.
Excuses everywhere for lack of performance, people are just not doing a good job, its blamed on schedule, the tools, the PLM, the CAD, everything else is bad, but really its lack of training, hiring the wrong people for jobs and back to the lack of accountability. People arent really following the processes and policy laid out in the QMS and then they wonder why stuff is so broken down the line. There are lots of reactive decisions that are only serving as bandaids to problems, so it ends up really hurting the project because later on when the MEs try to actually build this stuff, it blows up in our face and we have to end up doing a bunch of design changes.
Yearly Layoffs have really hurt morale, people are working for the wrong reason, instead of doing the right thing for the right reasons, they do whatever work makes it look like they are doing a big impact and performing at a high level so they are not laid off at the end of the year. So problems fester and are passed around group to group and only the projects suffer